The OpenXprocess blog is primarily about software projects and how to improve them. As well as musings on agile processes, software engineering in general, and methods like Scrum and Kanban, there's advice here too for users of process planning, execution and improvement tools - and the metrics they can provide.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Google announces new programming language for the web at GOTO Aarhus

Gilad Bracha and Lars Bak, designers of Dart, Google's potential replacement for JavaScript, came on stage at GOTO Aarhus this morning both dressed as Darth Vader, proclaiming they had gone over to the Dart side. While replacing the lingua franca of the web is not going to happen any time soon (even in the opinion of these guys), the language does look interesting. It has optional strong typing claiming both the flexibility and ease of running of a language like Smalltalk, with type safety (to a point), modularity / team programming features and better code completion tools of languages like Java.

Interestingly the second presentation of the day was also from a Googler (Alex Russell) whose contention was that the problem for web developers was not the language (!) but the platform, with most of delays and impediments to powerful web programs coming from the need for network roundtrips.

Anyway, it's definitely worth taking a look at the early prototype release of Dart which is available here: http://www.dartlang.org/